August 07, 2008

I have been watching for a while the ever-broadening range of definitions for "cloud." My favorite is a recent piece that explains that Skype, BitTorrent, and SETI are all clouds. I now realize that a cloud can be whatever you want it to be, and that this is the best definition of the term, from dictionary.com:

cloud11. to make obscure or indistinct; confuse

That got me wondering whether the "grid" term has also subject to similar expansion over the years. To some extent, yes--I've read about discovery grids, knowledge grid, data grids, and too many others to count. But I do think there has been a fair bit of conceptual clarity, albeit with some expansion over time. Specifically:

The term was initially used to refer to on-demand computing (basically the Amazon cloud definition, but without the benefits of virtual machines) -- e.g., see the first edition of The Grid

Then it was broadened to include resource federation within distributed virtual organizations (what you need to enable distributed teams to achieve on-demand access to their federated resources) -- e.g., see The Anatomy of the Grid

Then there is the use of the term to mean "any sort of parallel computing" -- e.g., see Sun Grid Engine, Oracle 10-G, etc. But that is just marketing.

Having dissed the term, I should explain why we at Chicago/Argonne are using it. In brief, we see an opportunity to make connections with the extremely interesting developments in on-demand/utility/cloud computing that are emerging in industry. Thus:

Kate Keahey describes her work on Nimbus as a "cloud", to point out that her Globus virtual workspace service provides the same virtual machine provisioning capabilities that Amazon EC2 provides (and some), but in a package that you can run on your machines (if you so desire).

We are holding a workshop on Cloud Computing and Applications in Chicago in October to help establish connections between those working on data-intensive science and thus developing tools and services for on-demand/utility/cloud computing.

December 02, 2007

For
example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be
replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part
of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be
the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform
"w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant,
wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

October 15, 2007

Exciting news from NASA. As Kennedy would have said: "We choose to [install Wi-Fi] in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal
will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are
unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,
too."

June 24, 2007

This video is dangerously funny. Thanks to Savas for this pointer--although I found an extended version that also includes the particularly humorous ending concerning the user manual. Perhaps some sensitivity in Redmond on that point? :-)